Geth - synced block header number is higher than actual number of blocks

Question

I'm trying to sync my geth node with geth --networkid=4 --fast --cache=512 --datadir="/Users/myname/Library/Ethereum/rinkeby/", which appears to be working. However, my node is apparently syncing way past the number of actual blocks on rinkeby, which leads me to believe I'm not on the right network. My last line of output is

count=2048 elapsed=561.414ms number=1578304 hash=1ff9ed…3df3b8 ignored=0,

but rinkeby only has about 1150000 on the chain right now. I haven't seen in the docs where anything else needs to be configured and I've started with a fresh chaindata directory.

EDIT: Console outputs:

> eth.blockNumber
0

> eth.syncing
{
  currentBlock: 1272698,
  highestBlock: 1935572,
  knownStates: 2246772,
  pulledStates: 2244979,
  startingBlock: 0
}

Answer 1

Hmm...eth.blockNumber is 0, which is odd, but eth.syncing shows my current block. Why is the highest block so much higher than what's represented in etherscan?

It's 0 because your database isn't synced. It still under the sync process, also looks like you aren't on rinkeby you're on ropsten.